I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to be in Scotland. I mentioned having gone to a local in Edinburgh and got a very confused "why would you ever go to Falkirk?" It's a pretty easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I recommend it if you have the time.
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.
Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!
But don't do the thing that American tourists do where they say "Oh we're staying in Edinburgh and on Wednesday we're going to drive up to Skye to see Dun-vay-gin Castle because it's our ancestral seat because we're totally MacLeods you know"
You won't be able to drive from Edinburgh to even Kyle and back in a day, never mind up to Dunvegan. You just won't.
I could drive you from Edinburgh to Dunvegan and back in a day but I can absolutely guarantee you're going to hate every single terrifying mile of the journey and you won't get to see much.
Some friends and I used to cycle to it from Kirkintilloch, after fuelling up in the Brexitspoons on the high street, and then a quick pitstop to take on another pint or so of fuel at Auchenstarry because it's a hell of a long run to the next town (Bonnybridge, Banknock being a bit out of the way).
> and the same power it would take to boil eight kettles.
Newspaper-style units, but laughter aside, I tried to do the math.
If a kettle is rated at 2.5kW, then five minutes of usage (to boil a kettle, or for eight of them do a turn of the bridge) is 2.5kWh * (5/60) * 8 = 1.6kW.
My Nissan Leaf stores about 24kWh. So it's about 7% of a Leaf's battery to turn the wheel, or 10km of range. Given mass, perhaps it is finely balanced, and that seems more reasonable than I expected.
I am not an electricity expert and will get things mixed up ;)
Suprisingly, the "axe head" sections each on one side of the circular top and bottom openings are unnessecary to the functioning, and just there for show.
It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
I have walked across it on the John Muir Way which is highly recommended. I actually didn't really remember what Hadrian's wall was. We always learnt it was to "keep out the Scots", but in fact it represented the Northernmost border of the Roman empire. I had no idea about the Antonine wall, nor that they got that far north.
The Scots are descended from an Irish Gaelic (Celtic) tribe who migrated from Ireland to Scotland in the 5th Century [0] (when all three of Britain's countries were created, it was a fascinating century).
The Romans were there before then, and left before then. The walls they built were to keep the Picts out (though this gets fuzzy - the line between "Pict" and "Briton" isn't as clear as conventional Victorian history books say).
One of the interesting things that I heard about the walls, and may or may not be true (I'd be interested if anyone has an update) is that the Romans never explored the top of the island, or sailed around it, and just assumed there was a lot more of it going north. If they'd known how close they were to the end, they might have just conquered all of it, which would probably have been less effort than building those two walls.
I really liked this one in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock
Built as a real working lift lock (originally 1904), rather than as a tourist attraction. Powered by a little bit of extra water in one of the buckets to tip the balance and drive the pistons.
There's also another unusual way - the Caisson lock.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
Yes, the Kelpies are suprisingly striking. I went along thinking they'd be a modestly interesting thing to see but the scale and sculpture work makes them a real "Wow" moment when you see them up close.
Even though it solves a very specific problem, I'm surprised this kind of boat lift hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Even just the self-balancing properties of it.
British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something.
As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
If the area was a major commercial shipping hub once, what's the reason it isn't any more? Depopulation? (If it's depopulation, then was it emigration or was it a fall in birth rates?)
The British canal system became largely obsolete when the Railways came. Partly because the railway companies bought the canals and closed them to strengthen their monopoly. The canals were restored and reopened by enthusiasts for leisure boating, and in this is still going on. This is strengthened by the tow paths being legal rights of way, and walking them is very popular.
Deindustrialization, triggered by depletion. The thing about mines is they don't last forever, and if you build your industry near the mines that supply it it becomes uneconomic once the mine is depleted.
Also, the world got a lot bigger, to the extent that a tiny canal was no longer meaningful.
The population of Scotland as a whole has grown slowly and continuously - nothing comparable to the mass depopulation of Ireland, even when you consider the Highland Clearances. It has however mostly concentrated in the economic centers of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
> The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ranges to fireplaces to benches to railings and many other items, but also carronades for the Royal Navy and, later, manufactured pillar boxes and phone boxes. Within the last fifty years, heavy industry has waned, and the economy relies increasingly on retail and tourism.
So, yes, deindustrialization. But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
> But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
I live very near to it, in the summer they have boat trips that take people a trip on one of the two passenger boats.
The kelpies are connected via the canal, maybe 4 miles of locks you have to go through if you want to hire a canal boat to travel from the wheel to the kelpies.
My Italian grandparents operated a fish, chips and ice cream joint in Falkirk called the York Cafe.
It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!
It still exists, the building at least. Ran past it yesterday. Remember it used to be Mathiesons team room for many years.
oh! and this is the first time I can remember someone discussing York Cafe on HN!
I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to be in Scotland. I mentioned having gone to a local in Edinburgh and got a very confused "why would you ever go to Falkirk?" It's a pretty easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I recommend it if you have the time.
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.
>easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh
Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!
But don't do the thing that American tourists do where they say "Oh we're staying in Edinburgh and on Wednesday we're going to drive up to Skye to see Dun-vay-gin Castle because it's our ancestral seat because we're totally MacLeods you know"
You won't be able to drive from Edinburgh to even Kyle and back in a day, never mind up to Dunvegan. You just won't.
I could drive you from Edinburgh to Dunvegan and back in a day but I can absolutely guarantee you're going to hate every single terrifying mile of the journey and you won't get to see much.
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While you're there, also see the Kelpies in Helix park: https://www.thehelix.co.uk/
> why would you ever go to Falkirk?
Callendar House, Falkirk Wheel, the Kelpies...
Also not far from Culross or Stirling, which also work as a nice day out.
whispers Stirling castle is better than Edinburgh castle
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Some friends and I used to cycle to it from Kirkintilloch, after fuelling up in the Brexitspoons on the high street, and then a quick pitstop to take on another pint or so of fuel at Auchenstarry because it's a hell of a long run to the next town (Bonnybridge, Banknock being a bit out of the way).
Ahahah "Brexitspoons". Never heard it before but it's brilliant!
> and the same power it would take to boil eight kettles.
Newspaper-style units, but laughter aside, I tried to do the math.
If a kettle is rated at 2.5kW, then five minutes of usage (to boil a kettle, or for eight of them do a turn of the bridge) is 2.5kWh * (5/60) * 8 = 1.6kW.
My Nissan Leaf stores about 24kWh. So it's about 7% of a Leaf's battery to turn the wheel, or 10km of range. Given mass, perhaps it is finely balanced, and that seems more reasonable than I expected.
I am not an electricity expert and will get things mixed up ;)
> Given mass, perhaps it is finely balanced
Not only is it balanced, because the boats displace water when they enter, if one side has a boat and the other doesn't, it still balances.
Practical Engineering YouTube did a video "the hidden engineering behind the Falkirk wheel" two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq6ZOVbKQhY
Suprisingly, the "axe head" sections each on one side of the circular top and bottom openings are unnessecary to the functioning, and just there for show.
It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
I have walked across it on the John Muir Way which is highly recommended. I actually didn't really remember what Hadrian's wall was. We always learnt it was to "keep out the Scots", but in fact it represented the Northernmost border of the Roman empire. I had no idea about the Antonine wall, nor that they got that far north.
Picts not Scots.
The Scots are descended from an Irish Gaelic (Celtic) tribe who migrated from Ireland to Scotland in the 5th Century [0] (when all three of Britain's countries were created, it was a fascinating century).
The Romans were there before then, and left before then. The walls they built were to keep the Picts out (though this gets fuzzy - the line between "Pict" and "Briton" isn't as clear as conventional Victorian history books say).
One of the interesting things that I heard about the walls, and may or may not be true (I'd be interested if anyone has an update) is that the Romans never explored the top of the island, or sailed around it, and just assumed there was a lot more of it going north. If they'd known how close they were to the end, they might have just conquered all of it, which would probably have been less effort than building those two walls.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Scotland
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I love that the designer used Lego to demonstrate the mechanism to funders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel#/media/File:Falk...
While true, the caption also notes this isn't his model.
I'm reading that the model he demonstrated was his (using Legos he bought for his child), but the picture is a reconstruction of that.
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The Falkirk Wheel is cool and a fun trip, along with the nearby Kelpies, which were much more striking in person than I'd anticipated.
The wheel is a one-of-a-kind, but there are other ways of avoiding having a ladder of flood locks, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_lift
I really liked this one in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock Built as a real working lift lock (originally 1904), rather than as a tourist attraction. Powered by a little bit of extra water in one of the buckets to tip the balance and drive the pistons.
There's also another unusual way - the Caisson lock.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_lock
Yes, the Kelpies are suprisingly striking. I went along thinking they'd be a modestly interesting thing to see but the scale and sculpture work makes them a real "Wow" moment when you see them up close.
Even though it solves a very specific problem, I'm surprised this kind of boat lift hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Even just the self-balancing properties of it.
Even if just for novelty purposes.
i believe the self-balancing properties are a core aspect of any (boat) lift, whether rotating or not.
Is it just for leisure or commercial traffic?
it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something.
As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
And shallower - when my son did rowing for a while on the Union canal they were told that if they capsized to simply "stand up"...
> so the boats are narrow, proportionally
Hence the name "narrowboat".
Leisure only, there hasn't been commercial traffic on that canal for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Canal_(Scotland)
If the area was a major commercial shipping hub once, what's the reason it isn't any more? Depopulation? (If it's depopulation, then was it emigration or was it a fall in birth rates?)
The British canal system became largely obsolete when the Railways came. Partly because the railway companies bought the canals and closed them to strengthen their monopoly. The canals were restored and reopened by enthusiasts for leisure boating, and in this is still going on. This is strengthened by the tow paths being legal rights of way, and walking them is very popular.
Deindustrialization, triggered by depletion. The thing about mines is they don't last forever, and if you build your industry near the mines that supply it it becomes uneconomic once the mine is depleted.
Also, the world got a lot bigger, to the extent that a tiny canal was no longer meaningful.
The population of Scotland as a whole has grown slowly and continuously - nothing comparable to the mass depopulation of Ireland, even when you consider the Highland Clearances. It has however mostly concentrated in the economic centers of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
I'd assume it's just good ol' deindustrialization.
In a nutshell, yep
The canals are too small for goods (and a lot of hastle opening/closing locks) - the road and rail networks are way faster.
From Wikipedia:
> The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ranges to fireplaces to benches to railings and many other items, but also carronades for the Royal Navy and, later, manufactured pillar boxes and phone boxes. Within the last fifty years, heavy industry has waned, and the economy relies increasingly on retail and tourism.
So, yes, deindustrialization. But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
> But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
(The nearest container port is Leith, which is about twenty miles away.)
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https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/11/17/the-hidden-eng...
YouTube version: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/11/17/the-hidden-eng...
A young Tom Scott too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO9gARac-w
I live very near to it, in the summer they have boat trips that take people a trip on one of the two passenger boats.
The kelpies are connected via the canal, maybe 4 miles of locks you have to go through if you want to hire a canal boat to travel from the wheel to the kelpies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kelpies
One of the truly great things from my old homeland. In the year 2000 Falkirk invented the wheel...
There are still some Neanderthals in Falkirk now shouting at hotels.
Yes, sadly aware. It's never a good thing to see the old homeland in the news.
It's like one of those equations where everything cancels out nicely.
It's amazing! But sad to hear of the vandalism that caused significant damage:
https://www.gentles.info/link/Vandals/vandals.html
That happened 24 years ago.
Indeed, I'd realised, but thank you for clarifying for others.